Road safety, transport, ultrarunning and astronomy. Where else will you find this mix?

Monday, 2 February 2009

Population: at last someone's mentioned it

I've been thinking for quite a while now that in environmental debate, the one thing nobody mentions is the impact of having children. Thank goodness someone's mentioned it in public at last. Now I'm no biologist, but I'm fairly sure having children is the only way we can hang around as a species. But that said, we can't really have them without there being an environmental impact. It's something we really need to talk about more.

If we're seeing limiting population growth as an answer to resource depletion and greenhouse gas emissions, we should really be talking about limiting western population growth, where each individual consumes up to ten times the resources / carbon of her Eastern counterpart. Notably, the problem is not solved by limiting the population elsewhere, if elsewhere isn't causing (most of) the problem. So, then the wheel has turned full circle; the problem is not population per se but excessive consumption by a segment of a global population. And that's been green movement's nuanced response for at least the last decade.